Down the Mother Lode | Page 5

The influence of gold controlled by the human intellect. I am old and tired and soon I shall sleep, but the old see clearly, too clearly, that which they are leaving, and that to which they pass."
"'Thus, facing the stars, we go out amongst them into darkness'," I quoted, softly.
"Not to darkness, but to eternal light, to rise again from the Mother Lode to mingle in the busy lives of men."
"'Who maketh His messengers with two, and three, and four pairs of wings'."
"Exactly. To be born again, and yet again. The real mother-vein of gold was imbued in the men shaped by the life of the frontier. It was the cornerstone of great fortunes, of families, of enterprises, of achievements which are peculiarly California's own.
"It was the clearing house and open sesame of the vast trade of the Orient which is just coming into being; the foundation for the bridge of gold which shall reach across the seas; a fit monument to posterity which shall be erected with all the lightness and grace and stability of the present cultured generations, born with their feet in the flowers grown from the mother-gold of decent manhood and glorious womanhood - the precious metals of the spirit, unalloyed and unafraid.
"They are the true Mother Lode, the bourne of the seekers of gold, greater, far, than the crazed brains of the old prospectors had the power to conceive. A further-reaching, broader arc than the most wondrous rainbow of their imaginings born of dreams, and built of hunger and despair."
"So shall we find, at last, the Mother Lode, the virginity of the essence of creation, the beginning and the end. The curve of the circle which is unchanging, insoluble, omniscient; which shall return to that which created it; which is all; which is God!"

"'49"
"We have worked our claims, We have spent our gold, Our barks are astrand on the bars; We are battered and old, Yet at night we behold Outcroppings of gold in the stars.
Where the rabbits play, Where the quail all day Pipe on the chaparral hill; A few more days, And the last of us lays His pick aside and is still.
We are wreck and stray, We are cast away, Poor battered old hulks and spars! But we hope and pray, On the judgment Day, We shall strike it, up in the stars.
- Joaquin Miller.

Contents

One Sunday in Stinson's Bar The Tom Bell Stronghold The Hanging of Charlie Price Rattlesnake Dick Indian Vengeance Grizzly Bob of Snake Gulch Curley Coppers the Jack The Race of the Shoestring Gamblers The Dragon and the Tomahawk The Barstow Lynching

Copyright, 1922
By Vivia Hemphill

One Sunday in Stinson's Bar
I
"On that broad stage of empire won, Whose footlights were the setting sun; Whose flats a distant background rose In trackless peaks of endless snows; Here genius bows, and talent waits To copy that but One creates."
- Bret Harte.

Now-a-days when you want to go from San Francisco to the Sierra Nevada country you step into your perfectly good Packard (or whatever it is - all the way down to a motorcycle side car), and you ferry across the bay and the straits, and if the motor-cop isn't around, you come shooting up the highway forty miles an hour, and at the end of a glorious five-hour run you are there.
In the early fifties - when there was less to see, too - you took more time to it. You came to Sacramento on the river boat. Then if you were rich, you bought a horse or a mule and rode for the rest of your journey. If you were poor, or thrifty perhaps, you walked, or tried to get a ride on one of the ox-freight teams which plied their way across Haggin Grant to Auburn and Dutch Flat, or to Folsom and Coloma.
Later a railway was built as far as Auburn station, then situated at a point three miles east of Loomis which was at that time called Pino.
Nothing remains of Auburn station. But the road bed of the old railway is still to be found in certain wooded tracts which have not given way to the fruit ranches; and the highway from Fair Oaks into Folsom follows the old cuts and grades for several miles.
In the days preceding and immediately following the discovery of gold in California, building was very difficult. Every stick of lumber in my grandfather's house came by ship "around the Horn," and the fruit trees grape vines, flowers, even bees, for his lovely garden: were all sent from Europe.
In the smaller settlements there was seldom more than one large building which could be used for social purposes, and this was often the card room or bar room in connection with the hotel of the town.
So here is the tale that was told of one Sunday